Fix + Foxy’s Dark Noon (June 7 - July 7, 2024) took the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe by storm. In it, South African artists including co-director and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and seven South African actors join forces with acclaimed Danish director Tue Biering and create an exhilarating theatrical experience. Dark Noon turns the myth of the American Wild West, as endlessly glorified by Hollywood westerns of the 1950s, on its head. This time, rather than history being told by the victors, it is told by the vanquished. On a vast bare stage, the skeleton film set of a Western town emerges in real time. The extraordinary actors embody the distinctive characters of America’s past: cowboys, gold seekers, missionaries, enslaved Africans, Chinese workers, Native Americans, prostitutes, Bluecoats, and Confederates. Through playful interpretation, the performers scrutinize the presumptions and misconceptions of the American Frontier. “Dripping with energy, irony and anger,” this “savage and gripping” work “tells the 300-year history of the American west in 100 uproarious minutes” (The Guardian).
What impressed me about the hyperkinetic piece — written and directed by the Danish Tue Biering, co-directed and choreographed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu — is its recognizing the marked difference between the lessons learned by American youth of the DuMont days and the takeaways that the South Africans reaped at a later date. Put succinctly, stateside viewers were indulged in visions of what could be distilled to a Cowboys-and-Indians ethic. They (we?) were shown partial truths indelibly integrated, a template for games played in local schoolyards. In contrast, South Africans were exposed to an up-close-and-personal look at white dominance of a country where other immigrants — slaves and the Chinese imported as cheap labor to lay the cross-country railroad — were seen as second-class citizens, or worse. (Is there any need to note it’s a cock-eyed assessment too often enduring today?)
Even if you buy that argument, your tolerance for its expression may be greater than mine. I don’t feel improved, enlightened or even chastened by a furious man repeatedly cracking a bullwhip in my direction. Nor was I amused by the dragooning of theatergoers brought onstage to witness atrocities or, at another point, to be turned, without warning, into slaves at an auction. The close-ups of their faces, as they crumple or freeze in the act of realization, are devastating, and not just for those undersold at $1. The devastation is of course the point. Everything “Dark Noon” chooses to explore figuratively was once quite literal to its victims. That there were millions of those victims lends moral importance to the endeavor — all the more reason it must be done well. But the play’s format seems to have gotten away from its values, creating a disturbing symbolic alliance between the storytellers and the perpetrators. It is no longer a representation of cruelty; it is cruel.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
St. Ann's Warehouse Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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